Camp Strange

Mar­tin in the desert

Sun­day morn­ing I packed one of those paper gro­cery bags with blood oranges from my back­yard tree, a hand­ful of shelled wal­nuts in a plas­tic bag­gie, a few cans of good gin­ger ale, a bag of home­made corn chips, a pack­age of fig cook­ies, and I stuck it in the back of my van. I told the boys to grab a gar­den trowel and a ham­mer and a chisel from the bam­boo shed, and I piled those in the van, too, along with five gal­lons of water and two empty Avon boxes. The boys piled into the mid­dle seat with a pile of comic books between them and the dog and the pig shared the floor beneath their feet. I wanted to leave the pig at home but I thought about the fur­ni­ture and bas­kets of macadamia nuts dry­ing in the sun­room and the toys, oh man the toys, cov­er­ing every avail­able surface.

And we hit the road! Hit it hard, rolled south with salsa music blast­ing from a tin radio, then east past San Diego, into the boul­der crater moun­tains my boys call Moon Val­ley. I glanced in the rear view mir­ror and watched the boys read­ing, dog sleep­ing, and pig press­ing his body against 10’s legs and his snout against the side win­dow, watch­ing the rocks rib­bon beside us and leav­ing a coat of thick drool along the win­dow gasket.

I con­sulted a map as I drove, can of gin­ger ale between my legs. I bought the map at a junk shop in Escon­dido, from a comic book man with deep set eyes and thin fin­gers. He took a green ball­point pen from his shirt pocket and cir­cled areas on the map.

“The best marine fos­sils are here. Mounds of ‘em. You can scoop them up with a shovel. Noth­ing like it in the county.” His breath smelled of cof­fee and alco­hol and his eyes sunk deeper into his head as he looked at the map and wrote off-road direc­tions along the side. “Now here you’ve got your pet­ri­fied wood. Just grows right outta the ground like cab­bage. You can only take twenty-five pounds a day, that’s the law. Some­times Bor­der Patrol is out in that area so don’t mess around with that.”

I pulled the van off at Ocotillo Wells and dove south, into the rem­nants of an ancient sea bed and fol­lowed those hand-written descrip­tions for four miles across a desert wash caked with dried mud and dry­ing spring grasses. I drove until I knew my van would drive no more in the soft sand. We opened to the cool dry air and hiked down a crusty ravine into the oys­ter beds of many mil­lions of years ago. The comic book man was right. Fos­sils lit­tered the ground in every direc­tion, fos­sils of hard rock oys­ters and chevron shells and del­i­cate brain coral, some dark split black, some opal­ized into a gem­stone hint of pearl and glass. The boys used small trow­els to dig for the best spec­i­mens and I sat on a flat piece of gran­ite and watched them pick and dig, pick and dig. The dog lay on the tail­gate of my van, curled into a tight ball. Frankie the pig fol­lowed the boys and his sharp red har­ness stood out among the dull rock and our earth tone clothes.

Oys­ters. Frozen in time. I held a fos­sil and ran my hands over the rocky ridges, the smooth under­side, imag­ined myself under hun­dreds of feet of water, an oys­ter in some other world sea. I thought about The Man, too, thought about our Sat­ur­day together, how he returned my call and invited me to walk a labyrinth with him in an ancient med­i­ta­tion practice.

I dressed in torn jeans and an orange long-sleeved t-shirt and drove to the scrub for­est of his town and met him at the stone cir­cle. We walked the path, the snake path, outer cir­cles turn­ing to inner twists, fol­low­ing the sim­ple sand space between rows of smooth white stones. I walked three feet in front of The Man, kept my eyes on the ground, let foot fall in front of foot, and cen­turies of fos­sil life fell from my arms, chest, mind. I turned to look at my friend, this man of heaven who kissed me and left me in tur­moil. I stepped two labyrinth rungs over, let him pass, watched him move with rev­er­ence and attention.

I know you, I thought. I remem­ber you. I remem­ber you. And some­thing broke inside of me, broke and spilled on the sand below my body. I don’t know what it was, felt past-life heavy and use­less. I jumped past the last maze hur­dle, started run­ning to my van, and didn’t look back.

I’m alone this after­noon the way I’m always alone though I share a house with kids and birds and dog and now a pig. I’m alone like those stolen fos­sils lying in the coastal sun by my front door. I left a man in a maze. And a man left me this morn­ing, left me and this world for some new jour­ney. Some­how that’s the way of my world.